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Pivot or Pilot?: The Role of the Independent Members of Wages Councils*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

June Stevenson
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Abstract

Britain has no statutory minimum wage. There is a system of wages councils responsible for fixing statutory minimum rates in forty-one trades where wages are low relative to the average, opportunities for working overtime are variable and no adequate machinery for collective bargaining exists. A peculiar feature of this system is the presence of three independent members who form a third ‘side’ in council negotiations. This article looks back briefly over the seventy years of the existence of wages councils (originally trade boards) and the changes in function which have occurred albeit by implication rather than overtly. It then proceeds to examine the role of the independent members within the system as it is now. Do these ‘conciliators with a casting vote’ fulfil a useful function? The main problem facing them today is seen as the need to reconcile the original purpose of helping to fix a just (or less unjust) wage translated into contemporary terms with a remuneration which is reasonable and feasible under the circumstances prevailing within the trades covered by wages councils.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , January 1980 , pp. 25 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 “The fixing of a maximum wage was one of the functions of local bodies in the first half of the fourteenth century in England…But it was the Australian legislation of 1894 and 1896 that gave the impetus to the modern minimum wage legislation movement’ – Sells, Dorothy, The British Trade Boards System, P. S. King and Son, London, 1923, p. 1.Google Scholar

2 Wages Councils Act 1979Google Scholar, Section 14(1). Compare this section with Wages Councils Act 1959Google Scholar, Section 11(1).

3 Wages Councils Act 1979Google Scholar, Section 1(2) (a) (c) (my italics). Paragraph (c) includes provisions relating to the involvement of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS).

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11 It was not always so. Sells refers disapprovingly to the privilege of voting by sides which could be granted only by the minister: ‘Side voting…tends to hinder the expression of individual opinion by vote, and strikes at the root of the representative theory’ – Sells, op. cit. ch. 1.

12 Committee of Inquiry into the Working and Effect of the Trade Board Acts (Cave Committee) 1922, Minutes of Evidence, p. 660, quoted in Bayliss, F. J., ‘The Independent Members of Wages Councils’, British Journal of Sociology, 8:1 (1957), 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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18 There were then approximately 3 million workers in the wages council sector. Their numbers declined in 1978, with the abolition of two councils, and the latest figures published by the Department of Employment show that in 1978 2.75 million workers in an estimated 391,000 establishments were covered by forty-one councils – Department of Employment, Gazette, 87:5 (1979). 454.Google Scholar

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33 The Department of Employment rapped the knuckles of every council which exceeded the 10 per cent (Phase Three) guideline even by less than 1 per cent.

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36 Wages Councils Act 1979, Sections 4, 5 and 6.

37 Sells, op. cit. p. 8.

38 Homeworkers are not unrepresented, so far as I am aware, but they lack union support.

39 Statutory joint industrial councils are hybrids: they are part of the statutory system, with power to make legally enforceable orders, but they are without independent members.

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49 The making of these decisions would be made easier if the wages council secretariat were enlarged to enable the excellent service which it gives to members to be extended into more detailed research relating to the structure and conditions of the trades affected.

50 Sinfield, op. cit.

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